Vista Equity Partners has agreed to acquire the public key infrastructure (PKI) business unit of HID, the Austin, Texas-based identity and access management company owned by ASSA ABLOY.
PKI is the system of digital certificates and cryptographic keys that organizations use to verify the identity of the people, devices, websites, applications and software that connect to their systems. HID’s PKI unit sells tools that issue and manage those certificates for government, regulated and compliance-focused organizations, including certificates used to verify employees and contractors accessing secure systems.
The carve-out will be made by Vista’s Foundation Fund, and the business will operate as a standalone company after the deal closes, which is expected in the fourth quarter. Financial terms were not disclosed, and HID had not issued its own announcement.
HID agreed in July to transfer another unit, its Workforce Business Unit, including the HID SAFE physical identity and access management platform and its visitor management products, to SwiftConnect in exchange for additional equity in that company.
Stephen Foster, a managing director in Vista’s Foundation strategy, described the PKI deal to PE Hub, which first reported it. “The assets we are acquiring comprise technologies that are critical for identity security and span humans, machines and AI agents,” he said. He said the unit is made up of four products that “collectively issue and automate the management of these certificates at scale for government and enterprise customers.”
Foster tied the deal to the spread of AI agents, the software programs that act on behalf of users and organizations. “As organizations put AI agents to work, each agent needs an identity that can be verified before it is trusted with sensitive systems and data,” he said. The unit also works on quantum-resilient cryptography, which is designed to withstand attacks from future quantum computers capable of breaking the encryption used in most digital certificates today.
Foster said Vista would work with the company on both organic and acquisition-based growth, which could include future mergers and acquisitions, and that Vista’s in-house team of AI engineers and product experts could help it design and launch agentic products.
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
